Good Things

Colin McGinn

Suppose I perform an action certified by morality as good – say, giving money to charity. I then do something good because it is good. We might say that this action had the moral property goodness and that in acknowledging this to be so I had a reason to perform it. Anyone else has an equal reason to perform the same action, which is good no matter who performs it. Thus, generalising: morality is aptly seen as a set of principles that ascribe values to states of affairs and thereby provide reasons for bringing those states of affairs about. Morality says what we ought to do and in so far as we grasp its dictates we have the reasons it specifies: we know what we ought to do, and that we ought to do it is a reason for doing it.

This commonsense picture makes many philosophers squirm, and not because they are avowed moral nihilists. There are two main reasons. The first is that it seems to presuppose moral ‘cognitivism’: the agent recognises goodness as an objective property that may be instantiated by his actions. By ascribing it to an action, he comes to know an objective truth – that his action is (or will be) good. This makes some philosophers nervous, because it suggests a metaphysics they don’t like the look of, whereby goodness becomes a ‘queer’ property of things.

There is a second reason why the picture is found rebarbative: it entails morality affording reasons for action that fail to take into account what the agent may himself desire or what may be in his interest. Once I see that giving money to charity is good I have a reason to do it, but that reason holds whether or not I want to give money to charity. I may not care about the people who will benefit, but there is still a reason for me to do it – that they will benefit. So moral reasons do not appear to depend on my contingent desires. To many philosophers that is hard to take: how could reasons not involve desires?

Philippa Foot is foremost among those who have jibbed at the notion of reasons that are independent of desires. She doesn’t believe in goodness as a property that, once recognised, provides reasons for action. Morality itself does not, for her, supply any reasons for action; reasons come in only when agents have desires that happen to conform to morality’s prescriptions:

Moral judgments are, I say, hypothetical imperatives in the sense that they give reasons for acting only in conjunction with interests and desires. We cannot change that, though we could keep up the pretence that it is otherwise. To hang onto the illusion, and treat moral judgments as necessarily reason-giving, is something I would compare to a similar choice in matters of etiquette; and indeed we do find some who treat the consideration that something is ‘bad form’ or ‘not done’ as if it had a magical reason-giving force.

That an action is morally good is thus not a reason why I should do it. I have no more reason to refrain from murder on account of its badness than I do to refrain from holding my fork in my right hand when in England, where it isn’t done. Reasons enter the picture only if I happen to desire to act in accordance with the rule in question. Morality thus has no intrinsic rational authority over our wills. There is nothing contrary to reason about not doing the right thing, and irrationality can only consist in not doing what will best satisfy our desires (which may be egoistic or altruistic).

This doctrine is rightly seen as subversive and disturbing. The mere fact that something is good is not, according to Foot, even a start at providing a reason to do it; it is the wrong kind of consideration altogether. We get into the realm of reasons only when we dig around in someone’s actual desires and decide that he happens to want to do various things, as it might be to keep promises. Reasons are internal to the agent and variable across agents; morality’s apparent universality is a fiction. This is a radical view. Instead of being able to say to the miscreant ‘You should do such and such’ and expect this to supply him with a reason, we can only say ‘If you look inside yourself, you will see that you really want to do such and such.’ Rational persuasion then comes to an end if he retorts ‘Actually, I don’t want to do such and such, thank you very much.’

Letters

Colin McGinn was right (LRB, 5 September) to praise the work of the late Warren Quinn. His extraordinary talent made Quinn pre-eminent in the small group of philosophical friends working together on moral philosophy in the UCLA philosophy department of the Eighties. But McGinn was wrong to suggest that Gavin Lawrence’s work is derived from Quinn’s. I know this because Lawrence had expounded his views to me (thus helping me to abandon desire-based theories of reasons for action) long before he came to UCLA and met Quinn.

Philippa Foot
Oxford

It’s an occupational hazard of philosophers, as professional purveyors of theory, to reduce all wrongdoing to theoretical error. Challenging those, like Philippa Foot and Bernard Williams, who deny that a moralists are irrational, Colin McGinn says that since it’s absurd to say that the thinker’s desires, rather than logical validity, decide whether it’s rational for him to infer q from p and ‘if p, then q,’ it’s also absurd to think that it’s rational for an agent to act on his desires, rather than doing what morality tells him.

This analogy is beside the point. Those, like Williams and Foot, whose moral thinking is strongly influenced by Humean philosophical psychology, simply deny that there is a relevant analogy between inferential reasoning (which Hume described as involving only ‘relations of ideas’) and practical reasoning manifested in action: in the philosophical idiom of a later age, Hume thought the assumption that there was such an analogy commits a category mistake. This may be false, but given the Humean denial, analogical argument is as question-begging here as it usually is in philosophy.

Denying that the amoralist as such is irrational need not, as McGinn seems to think, entail that ‘morality’s apparent universality is a fiction.’ Assuming McGinn means that what is held to be fictional is morality’s being universal, rather than the fact that it so appears, it is consistent to deny the amoralist’s irrationality, while agreeing that moral talk often cites universalistic reasons. The latter are reasons which (unlike their so-called ‘prudential’ counterparts) are not withdrawn when someone, for intelligible reasons, can’t be bothered with morality. Someone may rationally decide, when confronted with such reasons, that they’re not for him; he may thereby show himself to be a poltroon or a knave, but need not be a fool.

As this suggests, the analogy mislocates moral culpability too. Does McGinn really think that what’s wrong with liars and murderers is all of a piece with the bungling of fresh-men who aren’t much good at propositional calculus? If so, sympathy is due to McGinn’s students, for more reasons than one.

Philippa Foot (Letters, 3 October) says that I ‘was wrong to suggest that Gavin Lawrence’s work is derived from [Warren] Quinn’s’. But I suggested no such thing: I said it was odd that Lawrence didn’t mention Quinn’s work in view of the similarity between them and their professional proximity. I had no information on the question of influence. After all, people do often cite each other because they hold similar positions independently arrived at. So I still think it is odd (though not perhaps of the highest moment).

Incidentally, that was the last review I shall be writing for this journal for the foreseeable future; so, readers, adieu.